Stuart asks – ‘I would love to know what type of goals you set yourself in terms of future earnings, readership, subscribers, commenters and even SEO growth. Mainly because I’m just really nosey but also because I like to know how the BIG boys play the game.’

Hi Stuart – good question and one I’ve not really written about for a while now. It’s time for a bit of an update on it because my goal setting practices here have changed somewhat.

In my early days of moving towards ‘going Pro’ (or full time) as a blogger I used to set a lot more goals than I currently do for my blogs.

When my wife and I decided to give blogging for an income a go we set me a six month deadline to be earning enough income to justify the time I was putting into my blogging (at this stage I’d already been blogging part time as a hobby for a year or so). At this time I set myself some goals in these areas:

• posting frequency – it was in this time that I set myself the goal of posting 20 times a day (less on weekends). I was working on almost 20 blogs at the time so 20 was the minimum number of posts that I wanted to write – some days I’d do up to 40.
• ptraffic targets – my goal for a while there was to see traffic grow by 10% per month.
• pincome targets – similarly I aimed for 10% growth in income

I didn’t really many more specific goals than that. Of course I wanted to increase comment levels, subscriber levels and my search engine rankings – but I didn’t really put any measures on these things (in fact subscriber levels couldn’t be measured at this time as it was Pre-Feedburner Counter days).

These days I still track all of these metrics – but I don’t set myself hard and fast goals in them on the majority of my blogs. Instead, my goals are a lot more broad (ie – I want reader numbers to increase – no numbers or set targets).

There are a few main reasons why I don’t get so worked up about goals:

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This post has been submitted by Neil Patel. Neil is co-founder and CTO of ACS) and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising.

Engadget, The Huffington Post, Boing Boing, and TechCrunch all share the common thread of being wildly popular and successful. While that seems entirely wonderful and we’d all hope for the same thing with our blog, the reality is that most of us will never have blogs that popular. I’m hoping that people will step up and prove me wrong and to give everybody a head start, here are some things we can all learn from the success of these blogs:

1. There is nothing wrong with blogging once a week, but the more you blog the more traffic you will receive. All of these blogs put some merit in quantity and blog a ton of content, yet they try and not sacrifice on quality either. This isn’t easy to accomplish by any means, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that quantity doesn’t matter.

2. Like any normal business, you are going to have a good amount of competitors or in this case people writing about the same thing and fighting for those RSS subscribers. Again, like any normal business you need to carve a niche of your own and really differentiate yourself in the crowd. Pick a passion and become a thought leader within the confines of your niche and your blog will grow in popularity.

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Today’s guest post is from Chris Garrett from chrisg.com.

For many bloggers their income focus is based on direct methods. Most bloggers have at least tried some advertising, particularly Adsense. There is a massive potential though for earning money indirectly from blogging.

Direct methods would include

• Advertising – Adsense, Banners, Chitika
• Affiliates – Visitor buys through your link, you get a commission
• Links – Paid for having their link on your blog
• Paid Reviews – You pay me to review your site/product through PPP or ReviewMe
• Sponsorships – Tends to work like a longer term advertising but can include the sponsor providing products and services rather than a purely financial arrangement.
• Gifts – Visitors like your stuff so much they reward you with tips, or perhaps you have a donation drive to attract a certain figure for a particular purpose

These methods will involve your blog as the central driver of the transaction. In indirect methods the driver is usually you and in most cases the blog is absent from the transaction. The critical factor in indirect methods is your reputation. A reputation built completely or in part using blogs.

Let’s take a look at some ways bloggers have used their blogging reputation to earn money because of their blog but not necessarily using their blog.

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